


We Hold Each Other

by monolithjemma



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Comfort/Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fitz wants to protect her, I swear it, Perthshire Bound, Post 3x10, True Love, Will is dead, canon compliant through 3x10, jemma feels guilty, otp, so what's new
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-09
Updated: 2015-12-09
Packaged: 2018-05-05 20:21:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5388989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monolithjemma/pseuds/monolithjemma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Heading home on the Zephyr One, Jemma asks Fitz what happened to Will.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Hold Each Other

**Author's Note:**

> I may make this a multi-chap of snapshots for the next three months....while we wait to see if the science cuties can manage to get their sh** together, finally.

"I can handle it, Fitz." 

 

Everyone else has long since dropped off to sleep or drifted out of the cargo bay. It hasn't sunk in, Fitz thinks, that they made it out of that bloody castle, off that bloody planet, in one piece. 

 

Fitz can't sleep until Jemma does, can't leave until she releases him. She hasn't done either. 

 

"Hmm?" Fitz responds noncommitally. 

 

"You found him, didn't you?"

 

She's sitting right beside him, so close that a deep breath in could push her shoulders to brushing his. He feels her nerves vibrating off her every cell, wanting and not wanting to hear the answer at warring frequencies. 

 

"Yeah," Fitz answers, his voice low and gravelly, a muted warning. 

 

"Was he..." Jemma draws in a shuddering breath. "Was he dead?"

 

Fitz hesitates for a split second. The simple truth will be good enough for tonight, he decides. The whole truth, he'll leave to Coulson while Fitz sits beside her. Or at least leave to tomorrow.

 

"Yeah. I'm sorry, Jem."

 

Fat tears roll from her eyes, drip silently off the cliffs of her cheekbones. Then she presses her lips together and nods, swallowing hard. "How long?"

 

"Hard to say. Since not too long after you left, I reckon."

 

Jemma draws in a shuddering breath and Fitz just wants to keep talking, not put her on the spot anymore, even though trying to assuage her deep and multifaced feelings of guilt is pointless. "I saw where you stayed. I'm...uh...I'm grateful. To him. It was a good shelter. And, er...warm."

 

Jemma twists her fingers together in her lap, nodding, the sobs held off for now.  "He...um...he hated it when I left the cave. Alone."

 

"Good," Fitz says, nodding. As much as he hates thinking of Jemma and Will so close in the bowels of that awful planet, he hates the thought of her tumbling down dunes and stumbling through sand storms more. 

 

"He grunted more than he actually spoke. His table manners were long gone, I suppose, with his social skills after so many years. Never understood seventy-five percent of what I was saying. Or not saying, I suppose. Made conversation nearly impossible. There were books there, a shelf full, but he only ever read the campy sci-fi. Over and over. The copy of Harry Potter was barely touched. In fourteen years!"

 

"Insane," Fitz murmurs, noticing Jemma's small, exasperated smile and returning it.

 

"It could have been worse. We never fought. Well, except for..."

 

Jemma's gaze had gone distant and still, and Fitz turns to her, finally looking at her straight on instead of sneaking glances out of the corner of his eye. 

 

"What? He didn't..."

 

"Hurt me?" Jemma scoffs. "No, never. Not once. Yelled at me, but never laid a hand on me in anger." 

 

Fitz bristles at the thought of anyone yelling at Jemma, before remembering that he had done just that weeks ago. Pink tinges his ears as the shame rises to his chest. He really must stop his temper from coming out around her. 

 

"No," Jemma says, twisting her hips on her seat to return Fitz's straight-on gaze. "The only thing we fought about was...you." She bites her lip and trains her eyes down. Waiting.

 

"Me? Wha -"

 

"Because I still loved you." Jemma's words rush out like a freight train headed over a cliff and landing on the world's largest pillow. She manages to look up at Fitz again but her lip trembles. "He said I couldn't really love him when I still loved you so much."

 

"You - um...Jem, that's -" If there had ever been a more impossible situation to find words for, Fitz couldn't think of it. 

 

"He was right," she rushes in. "I gave up hope in one way, but I guess that part of me just couldn't let you go." 

 

Fitz lets out a long, shaky breath. "And now?" 

 

"Nothing's changed," Jemma blurts. "I hate that we couldn't save him. He deserved better. But what I hate most is that I sent you after him when he was already - when you couldn't have even - and I would have lost you, Fitz!"  Her quiet voice has turned into a plaintive cry, begging him to do something, to bring out his magic toolkit of Jemma-bandaids, to patch her up and hold her together like he always had. 

  
Like he always will. 

 

He scoots closer to her on the bench, pressing hip against hip, letting his arm loose on its natural path around her shoulders, pulling her to him, sighing in relief when her arms wind around his neck and her temple presses to his collarbone. "You didn't lose me," Fitz murmurs into her hair. "There's no harm done. I actually got quite a shocking day trip out of the situation, making me an even more unique human being than my humungous brain already made me." 

 

He feels Jemma's cheek press against his chest, pushing up into a smile, and his heart relaxes. He's done it - he's taken away her pain for just the briefest moment. If he can keep stringing those moments together for her, she might find it in her to keep him by her side. 

 

She lifts her feet from the floor and swings them up to tent over his thighs, tilting her hips so that her knees press into the soft space between his ribs. Fitz's other arm wraps around her, cradling her body, so miraculously whole and beside him, in the shelter of his chest. "What now?" she murmurs, her breath hotly pushing through the thin weave of his button-down. 

 

"Now, we hold each other." Fitz lets out a long-suffering, shaky breath. "Now, I make you a promise. That my heart is, always has been, and always will be, yours. And that as far as you and I are concerned, you don't have a single thing to worry about."

 

She lets out a soft, breathless laugh, notching her forehead into the space where his neck and shoulder meet. Already, he feels her body grow heavier against his with each breath, the strange relief of this conversation finally allowing her to relax a bit. He feels tears wet on his skin, can smell their briny infusion into the small pocket of air between them. "Now I tell you that you have my heart as well. Never stopped." 

 

He presses a kiss to her temple, baffled that this conversation doesn't end in lips meeting lips, as he always imagined it. None of that matters. What matters is this brave, brilliant, beautiful woman who just entrusted her battered, broken, exhausted heart to his care. As her breaths even and her full weight presses him firmly to his seat, he dips his mouth to murmur against her ear. "I know, Jem. I know." 


End file.
